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Informal employment in Benin

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Page context: Home > Transport International Magazine > Issue 26 January 2007 > Representing the unrecongnised > Informal employment in Benin

Air transport

Benin has one international class airport. In addition to permanent state employees (civilian and military), it employs 251 people in related services in informal work, essentially in the provision of services such as car hire to foreigners who have just arrived; small-scale food outlets, in which women are in the majority; and baggage handlers.

State employees are in the National Union of Air Transport Workers, but hardly any informal workers are members of a union.

Maritime and river transport

Cotonou is one of the most dynamic ports in the West African subregion. It has approximately 3509 employees and is the fifth biggest port after Lagos (Nigeria) Téma (Ghana), Abidjan (Côte d’Ivoire) and Dakar.

Port use and management are administered by several large public agencies. There is also a multitude of forwarding agents, dockers, pointers, intermediaries, couriers, consignees and several transit companies, which operate informally.

River transport is not very developed and is essentially focused on Lake Nokoue. It allows trading between the people living around the lake and the international market in Cotonou. Most of those working in this trade are women, although it is difficult to estimate the numbers involved. They are mainly boat owners that provide a shuttle service.

No union exists for these workers – unlike the dockers and pointers who have a union, although it is politically dominated and not yet very active.

Railways

The railway is 438 km long and links Cotonou and Parakou. It is a multinational railway (Benin, Niger) with a freight transport capacity of 600,000 tonnes per year.

The development of the railways was accompanied by the emergence of a whole array of services: catering, sale of crafts, jewels and traditional medicinal products, etc. These services are offered to passengers on the trains or at stations.

When the railways were constructed, around 25 stations were built along the only currently operational line, the Cotonou-Parakou line. Almost all the women from surrounding villages work in informal jobs at these stations.

According to estimates made by railway workers themselves, between 5,000 and 10,000 people are employed in these services. These workers have no trade union organisation at all. However, they do have savings and credit associations (tontines) and organisations of a social nature that are structured as associations, with a president who is responsible for seeing the organisation’s rules are obeyed, a secretary who looks after the organisation’s documents and a treasurer.

The permanent staff in this sector are drawn from two rival nationalities, which makes this workforce far from cohesive. There is a trade union, but it has little power, mainly due to the social problems.

Road transport

The main means of passenger and freight transport is by road. Government transport department figures show that there has been an eight to nine per cent annual increase of traffic on asphalted roads and five to six per cent on non-asphalted roads over the last 10 years. The road network covers 3,425 km, 35 per cent of which is asphalted. This sector includes freight and passenger transport, which is largely informal.

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Issue 26 January 2007

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